This garden was created for the famous Nanjing International Garden Festival, that celebrates and highlights garden design and techniques since the year of 1999, being a laboratory for contemporary garden and landscape design worldwide.
Nanjing International Garden Festival 2021 theme was “destruction and rebirth”. In a sense the definition of garden includes this idea of nature’s regeneration through seasons, transformation due to adaptation. It is a cycle.
More symbolically, “destruction” is also here to evoke the human responsibility on primitive nature destruction by the simple act of designing a city, living a city. “Destruction” means also disaster, natural or human like any earthquake or war. “Reconstruction” as hope, the hope of doing even better, also the hope of the memory of places, to preserve it, to develop it, to work on it. To understand how a garden can be a very close connection, as rooted in history and in geography. This is the storytelling of this garden, talking about the metaphor for both protection and sharing. This garden means learning to preserve the memory of a place, develop it, encourage everyone to take care of its history and also learn to rebuild.
To describe this haven of peace, a raised walkway greets people, crossing diagonally the garden and spanning varied spaces: as the trimmed bushes, giving pride of place to the topiary art, but also lush patios including palm trees as the Trachycarpus fortunei, the famous Chusan palm native from China, numerous ponds and waterfalls whose sound of water guides walkers, sunken gardens, sculptures and paintings… This elevated walkway allows you to gradually discover this succession of rich and surprising spaces by taking your time while the vegetated columns punctuate the promenade.
This garden deploys a large palette of colors, diverse scents, and a vegetal exuberance. But it also provides water under different expressions. The water in this garden is very present. It is the water that we sometimes tend not to see, the water wasted with the garden hose, the water forgotten to capture when it rains. It was therefore found by few sunken basins, but also via large circular tanks, by water jets… There is a whole watercourse in this garden, which circulates by gravity.
In 1,179 sqm (surface area of this garden), people will stroll on its footbridges which are placed in a way to discover all the aspects of the destroyed city covered by nature and we discover at the same time its treasures, its surprises, its cellars filled with jars, its painted walls on the outskirts of this garden, its landscaped walks, its topiaries carved in historic gardens.
Project Location: Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
Design year: 2020
Year Built: 2021
